Look inside the vacant, rotting Holiday Inn/Days Inn on I-65, one of Greater Lafayette's biggest eyesores. (Originally published February 2014.)

Dave Bangert

BATTLE GROUND, Ind. – Raise your hand if you ever thought the old Holiday Inn/Days Inn at Interstate 65 and Indiana 43 – once one of Greater Lafayette’s go-to lodging options before turning into a four-story shambles, vacant since 2003 – was ever going to be revived as a hotel.

Even the manager for the Illinois-based investment group that picked up the hulking, moldy, 106,383-square-foot eyesore in spring 2017 – buyers who swore, against eye-rolling popular opinion, that they’d done more with worse – walked in with doubts.

Padlocked fences surround a former Holiday Inn/Days Inn hotel at Interstate 65 and Indiana 43. The hotel has been vacant since 2003.

Dave Bangert/Journal & Courier

“I kind of wondered,” Mark Petty, project manager for MGM Plaza, told the J&C a little over a year ago, “what have we gotten ourselves into?”

More, perhaps, than the company thought, when it picked up the 6.5-acre property for well less than half the $1.9 million asking price – $750,000, according to county sales disclosures – from a previous owner who admitted to an administrative judge during a condemnation hearing in 2016 that he’d done little to fix or maintain for roughly a decade.

The town of Battle Ground, which a year ago agreed to hold off on the judge’s demolition order and initially gave MGM Plaza until April 2019 to get things squared away, apparently has seen enough.

On May 11, the town filed a petition in Superior Court 2, claiming work has stopped on the property and asking a judge to clear the way for demolition of buildings that are a nuisance and a danger.

“If they’d kept hitting their milestones, they could have kept on rolling,” said Eric Burns, attorney for the Battle Ground Town Council. “But they missed some deadlines, and there was no forward progress.”

Petty did not immediately return calls or emails about the hotel property. Steve Egly, Battle Ground Town Council president, said town officials agreed to refer all questions to Burns.

No court dates have been set. No defendant – including owners past and present named in the suit – had filed responses as of Thursday.

Meanwhile, chain link fencing, secured with padlocks, circles what’s left of the hotel structure. Broken glass has been removed from the windows and doors. And it appears that rooms that until a year ago still had furniture and room fixtures have been stripped to bare, cinder-block walls. The pool area – which once featured holes in the roof visible from I-65 – is gone. Weeds are high. And fresh graffiti is visible on the building from the former parking lot.

“It looks as if that much got done,” Burns said. “Beyond that, things stopped, and I don’t know why.”

That’s been the running theme for the hotel over the past decade – things just stopped.

The Holiday Inn North, as it was called, opened in 1972, touting an indoor swimming pool, shops and restaurant and bar that made it a popular spot for business outings and a place for visiting teams to stay before games against Purdue.

By fall 2002, the hotel had changed hands – it was a Days Inn at that point – and the pool area had fallen into such disrepair that Tippecanoe County building inspectors ordered management to close it, for fear that rafters from the cathedral ceilings might cave.

Days Inn, even with the pool entrance boarded up, kept going until May 2003, when the hotel closed with a $2 million debt and foreclosure proceedings working their way through court.

Vikram Mehta, president of REI Limited Partnership, a Northbrook, Illinois, company, bought the property in December 2004 for $600,000. Mehta’s firm, by his own account, didn’t do much with the property, other than to put up some chain link fence, which did little to stop looters from stripping wires and joy-seekers from touring the rooms, tearing them up and posting the video results on social media.

Town leaders in Battle Ground – who had annexed the hotel and land near it along Indiana 43, from I-65 to County Road 600 North, in 1996 – started pressing Mehta in 2012 to fix or demolish the building. They had little success getting his attention and said they were in no position financially to take on demolition work on a small town’s budget.

During a hearing in October 2016, Mehta surprised town leaders by showing up in Battle Ground to defend himself and the investment he’d made a dozen years earlier. (Egly testified that, despite the town’s efforts through the years, the morning of the hearing was the first time he’d met Mehta.)

That day, Battle Ground’s town marshal testified that officers patrolled the hotel grounds five and six times a day to keep people out. The county’s building commissioner rattled off a list of violations “of just about every building code,” describing debris in lobbies and rooms, showers of water between every floor because there were so many leaks in the roof, moldy carpets and exposed elevator shafts.

Mehta didn’t argue Battle Ground’s contention that the hotel he owned was an eyesore. (“I’m not saying it is not,” Mehta told the J&C that day.) But he protested to Judge Don Daniel, saying the economy was to blame for the hotel’s condition. He pleaded for more time.

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Battle Ground offered some grace as Mehta looked for a buyer. By May 2017, MGM Plaza had a deal to purchase the property from Mehta. And Battle Ground agreed to hold off on the judge’s order, provided MGM Plaza could show progress between then and a completion date of April 2019.

Petty, at the time, acknowledged there would be skeptics – from those who drove by on the daily commute to investors who might be asked to envision a hotel. But he said the structure, for all its problems, was solid and could be saved. In November, Petty was telling WLFI that things were happening and MGM Plaza had “spent a lot of money so far.” The hotel idea, he said, was still on.

And then …

Things got quiet in the months that followed.

And Battle Ground filed suit.

The petition asks to reinstate Daniel’s order and put the property into the hands of someone who can get that done.

The town is asking to bring down the old Holiday Inn/Days Inn, once and for all.